On February 19, 2026, the US EPA Administrator signed a final rule entitled, National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants: Coal- and Oil-Fired Electric Utility Steam Generating Units: Final Repeal.  The rule was published in the Federal Register on February 24, 2026 and becomes effective April 27, 2026.  A copy of the final rule is available here.  The rule repeals certain amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) Rule published on May 7, 2024.  More specifically, the final rule repeals the three (3) MATS amendments listed below.

• The filterable particulate matter (fPM) emission standard for existing coal-fired electric utility steam generating units (EGUs), which the EPA revised from 0.030 pounds per million British thermal units (lb/MMBtu) to 0.010 lb/MMBtu;

• The compliance demonstration requirement for the fPM emission standard for all coal- and oil-fired EGUs, which the EPA revised from allowing EGU owners and operators to choose between use of quarterly stack testing, use of continuous parametric monitoring systems (CPMS), or use of PM continuous emission monitoring systems (CEMS) to only allowing use of PM CEMS; and

• The mercury (Hg) emission standard for existing lignite-fired EGUs, which the EPA revised from 4.0 pounds per trillion British thermal units (lb/TBtu) to 1.2 lb/TBtu.

The rule also clarified the quarterly compliance report submittal requirements in Section 1 by removing “in an XML format” and replacing it with “in a format specified by the Administrator.”  This may seem to be a minor revision.  However, EPA had never developed XML schema for the quarterly compliance report and many utilities were expending a certain level of effort to generate reports in XML format as a conservative measure to meet the “letter of the law.”

Throughout the rule references to the “ECMPS Client Tool” have been replaced with “ECMPS reporting tool” to reflect the current migration from ECMPS 1.0 to ECMPS 2.0.  The migration to ECMPS 2.0 formally began on February 13, 2026.

For more information, please contact VIM’s COMPAS Team at COMPAS@vimtechnologies.com.

1. Impact from the ECMPS 1.0 -> 2.0 migration

EPA expects the migration to take place on February 13^th, at 5:00 PM ET and last approximately 3 weeks. During this time, no reporting software will be available.

A few things to keep in mind:

• For those affected, the 2025-Q4 MATS quarterly compliance report deadline is March 2, 2026. EPA doesn’t expect the ECMPS 2.0 platform to be on-line until March 9^that the earliest, facilities MUST get these reports submitted before February 13^th!  Please keep that in mind when preparing these reports.
• Users will no longer be able to synchronize with the EPA host from the ECMPS 1.0 Client Tool after February 13^th. If there is anything you need to load or populate from EPA database, you should plan to do it prior to the migration. While the Client Tool will be functional on your PC, it will no longer be able to connect to any EPA system.
• The Field Audit Checklist Tool (FACT) database will also no longer be supported or populated with new data. Like the ECMPS 1.0 Client Tool, we expect it to remain functional in limited capacity, but it will no longer receive data from ECMPS 1.0. Any future queries should be made through the Clean Air Markets Program Data (CAMPD) website at https://campd.epa.gov/.
• Any resubmissions (MP, QA, or EM) not completed prior to the migration will need to be completed in the web-based ECMPS 2.0 Client Tool using JSON formatted files. Please make sure you have the capability to produce files in this format for any resubmissions going forward.